First of all, the claim was not “the hardest thing to do in sports is have a good batting average in the major leagues.” It was “Hit a baseball.” But I can play your game too:
Unless you have played hockey at a highly competitive level, then you can’t make a save against an NHL left winger.
Unless you have played basketball at a highly competitive level, then you can’t make a shot in the face of Ben Wallace.
Unless you have played football at a highly competitive level, how the hell can you kick a 45-yard field goal?
The notion that “hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports” is preposterous. If that were true nobody would play baseball; it would be too difficult to be a popular participation sport. Is hitting a baseball harder than driving a golf ball 290 yards and landing it in the fairway? Is it harder than staying conscious over 12 rounds while tangling with Lennox Lewis? Do you really, honestly think that just hitting a baseball is a harder feat than executing a successful pole vault?
Er, and yet Michael Jordan hit many, many baseballs. He wasn’t good enough to make the major leagues but he didn’t strike out every time up, did he?
Come on. “The hardest thing to do in sports”? Gosh, ya think it’s harder than the balance beam? How do you even quantify such a claim?
And just how well do you think the average person would do returning Roger Federer’s serves? Not so well, ya think? Well, why isn’t hitting a tennis ball the hardest thing to do in sports?
This cliche has always bothered me too, but I believe there is a grain of truth to it. Personally I interpret it as “the hardest thing to do among things the athlete is expected to do as a regular part of their participation in the game.”
A little wordy for a cliche, but interpreted this way it is definitely true. A QB with a 30% completion average, a basketball player with a 30% shooting average, and a hockey player with an unblocked shooting percentage of 30% would be pathetic; in MLB the 30% hitter is a millionaire (OK, the hockey one is qualified as “unblocked”, meaning the goalie either saved it or there was a score, but still…).
I’ll also specify that the word “hard” is based solely on this success rate; as RickJay points out, there’s really no other way to measure it. I’ll also concede that other sports may involve routine activities that require more stamina, concentration, strength, or other athletic qualities, but to use some examples cited, gynmasts do not fall off the balance beam on 70% of their moves, a boxer isn’t considered “good” if he survives only 30% of his fights, and a tennis player who completes only 30% of his serves is not playing at Wimbledon.
Fundamentally, you’re getting illogical. It’s a matter of basic physics. Hitting a moving object with another moving object is inherently a very difficult thing to do. The size of the objects and the speed of the objects has everything to do with the level of difficulty. (Check out how much the government is sinking into a missle defense system.)
You can’t compare the physics of hitting an object to muscle strength or learned agility. That is illogical. Boxing is probably the toughest of all sports but hitting an object with one’s hand is intrinsically easier than hitting a moving ball with a bat (BTW, I’ve been in the ring). Nobody is saying that baseball is the toughest of all sports, it’s that the basic physics of moving object against moving object are extremely complex. The fact that humans can even do it is a credit to the development of the human brain and eye-hand coordination.
Using your example of tennis, what would a tennis game look like if the racquet was the same width as the diameter of the ball? How fast could a player serve and how many volleys would there be? What if the basketball hoop was continually moving? What if a hockey stick had no blade (and I love hockey much more than baseball)?
Certainly there are more difficult tasks than just hitting a ball with a bat but in the context of major sports there is no basic skill that is more complex.
I do agree with both RickJay and **Jimmy Chitwood ** that hitting a baseball thrown by a MLB pitcher is NOT the toughest task in all of sports…not by a longshot. Certainly not as hard as scoring a perfect 10 on the vault or other events in Olympic gymnastics.
If I had 100 at bats in the MLB, then I think I could get at least one hit maybe a few more but probably not more than 5 or 6. I did play competitive (though not professional) baseball while in high school a few years ago. I batted against pitchers who are now playing professionally and a couple of those at bats resulted in hits. Certainly, several of my friends could also get at least one hit. However, I could train all my life and liekly never score a perfect 10 on the vault in gymnastics with endless attempts.
I disagree. Let me explain this one. Go to the nearest football field with public access and bring a friend who can hold the football. Kick the ball again and again from the 35 yard line until it splits the uprights.
Seriously, I have kicked a 45 yard FG on a practice field and I’ve never played organized football. However, I cannot kick them at nearly the same success rate as pro place kickers.
Again, my success rate would be low by comparison, but I could certainly make at least one save in the course of a 60 minute game. I’ve never played hockey in any format.
But you’re not quoting much in the way of physics. Where are your equations?
My point is simply that it’s a stupid thing to say. It means absolutely nothing; as several people have now pointed out but you’ve not addressed, there are lot of things involved in gymnastics that qualify as basic skills in that sport that certainly appear to be vastly, vastly harder than hitting a baseball. Executing a pole vault seems to be much harder and there are far fewer people who can do it. Besides, there are many other sports that involve striking a moving projectile with a stick of some sort. Simply hitting a baseball is just not a difficult feat; I offer as evidence the fact that any healthy human being can hit a ball with a bat with, at most, a little practice. Little kids do it. I can cite many basic skills in other sports that are equally difficult and in some cases wholly unachievable without the most rigorous training; most people cannot execute any moves on the rings, for instance.
BUT YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S COMPARING THEM! YOU are saying that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports - which by extension means that you are comparing that skill with sports skills involving muscle strength or “learned agility.” So you’re the one making an illogical argument, even if inadvertently. I’m the one who’s saying the statement is nonsense for this very reason - it cannot be, and never is, quantified.
I think the OP’s question has been pretty much answered, but i just wanted to recommend an essay for people interested in the issue of major league batting averages. Get yourself a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s book Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: Lifelong Passion for Baseball, and read the chapter called “Why No One Hits .400 Any More.”
In answering the conundrum posed in the chapter title, Gould focuses his love of baseball and his grasp of the scientific method on the issue of hitting averages, and how they have changed—and, perhaps more importantly, not changed—over the past hundred years or so.
He points out that, despite some peaks and troughs in the graph, the average for major league ballplayers has remained pretty constant since the 1870s, at around .260. There have been periods when averages went up (e.g., when the pitcher’s mound was moved back) and when they went down (when the foul-strike rule was introduced, and when the pitcher’s mound was lowered and the strike zone decreased), but by and large averages in 1986 (when the article was written) were about the same as a century before.
The most significant change Gould finds is not in the average, but in the standard deviation, which decreased steadily and consistently all the way from the 1870s to the 1980s. That is, the variation from the mean has decreased over time. And this connects to the problem posed in his title, because Gould’s argument is essentially that the reason no-one hits .400 anymore is that the overall quality of play has improved.
This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense. Gould argues that modern players are, as a group, closer than their forebears to “the outer limits of human capacity.”
The more dangerous you are at the plate, the more likely you are to be walked. This in itself won’t affect your average because of course walks don’t count toward it. However, if you’re a manager, you’re more likely to allow, say, Curt Schilling to pitch to Albert Pujols than you are some middle reliever.
So, the more dangerous a hitter you are, you will be pitched to by a greater percentage of quality pitchers than some schlub who’s hitting .210 would be. You let anyone in the bullpen or rotation pitch to the .210 guy; if you have a poor pitcher on the mound facing a .400 guy, you pitch around him.
Thus, the higher your batting average, the less opportunities you have for quality at-bats.
Also, with a full count, Mr .400 will probably get a pitch outside the zone. If he swings, it’ll be an out. If he doesn’t, he walks, which is probably less damaging than what he would have done with a pitch over the plate. On the other hand, Mr. 200 gets a pitch in the zone, because he’s not very likely to hit it.
The other end is much easier. If you can’t hit above .200 and you aren’t a pitcher, you get sent off to Triple-A.
actually, looking at the stats from the last nhl season, not a single one of the top 50 point scorers had a shooting percentage of 20% or higher (and only 2 of the top 100 point scorers managed this) and most were between 11 & 16%. (and you are correct that a “shot” is counted only when, if not for the goaltender making a save, the puck would have entered the net – i.e hitting the post is not considered a shot on goal.)
ok, apples and oranges, but still somewhat analagous to achieving a fair hit in baseball… which percentage-wise seems a degree easier. and this in a season where scoring was up over past years in the nhl.
just saying.
Tell that to the little leaguers across the street who do it dozens of times every game. As RickJay tried to explain, and as I mentioned in my prior post, the generic task of hitting a moving object with a round stick is not that difficult. Children do it, adults do it, athletes do it, non-athletes do it. As long as you have some rudimentary amount of hand-eye coordination and physical strength, you can do this task.
It’s the way the game is set up that makes 30% success a difficult feat. Like I said, move the pitcher back 10 feet, and batting averages will go up 100+ points overnight. They’re still hitting a moving ball with a bat, but suddenly it’s not that tough to do.
This I think is close to answering the OP’s question. Glibly, in any statistical system, outliers are more common early in the system’s life. Translating that to MLB (once the early tinkering with the rules settled down), there were still a few individuals who could take advantage of game play in a way their counterparts couldn’t. As strategies developed for countering these outliers, they started to get fewer and fewer. Thus, players stopped hitting .400 because the opportunity to be an outlier–and if as Gould says the average player hits .260, .400 is definitely an outlier–faded with time.
Along these lines … one thing I’ve wondered is why there hasn’t been a later-day batting-average freak in major league baseball. The analogy would be Wayne Gretsky in the NHL, who trounced previous goal-scoring records as recently as the 80s. Where’s MLB’s “Wayne Gretsky”, who may hit .400+ a few times in his career?
Barry Bonds has been, statistically, an on-base-percentage freak earlier in this decade (with considerable controversy) … though many of his trips to first occured as results of the decisions of opposing managers.
I don’t think the point is “hitting a ball with a stick” I think the point is “hitting a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher that is trying to strike you out and you are required to use a standard baseball bat.”
I read somewhere that a groundball is more likely to result in a hit than a flyball, but now I can’t remember where I read that…and I’ve googled myself into knots and came up with squat. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Or did I probably just mis-hear some sportscaster?
You might be interested in The Wisdom of Crowds, a fairly recent book by James Surowiecki. The gist is that under certain conditions (and betting on horseracing could very well have those conditions), crowds are much smarter you would think, much better than any individual expert.
I want to nit pick this, both as a decent athlete and one with a physics degree…
Hitting a moving object with another moving object, or as I prefer, intersecting two motion vectors, is really incredibly easy, especially for the human brain. All it takes is practice, practice, practice. Batters are not crunching non-linear differential equations in their heads everytime they swing a bat, they are simply responding conditionally to a visual input (the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand).
The only thing that drops a batter’s percentage from .950 down to .300 is that the pitcher throws inconsistently placed pitches, which can vary the predicted path for the batter since the batter has to start their swing before the ball is even halfway to the plate.
Go to a batting cage, or batting practice, sometime. A batter can consistently whack home-run balls at will if the pitches are coming in with regularity from the pitching machine. This says to me that the skill is simply like any other, learned and practiced.
IMO, returning a first-serve effectively in tennis is far more difficult than hitting a pitch, when considering all of the inputs and variables involved.
We are missing the game within the game. Batters know what the pitcher throws best. The hitter knows what kind of pitches are in the pitchers arsenal. They are then picking a pitch to throw and hoping to fool the batter. The batter is guessing what pitch is coming. If a pitcher only threw fastballs he would get killed. The catcher signals to the pitcher what to throw. Withy computer info charting batter tendencies ,the batting gets a little tougher.
Yep, and Gould makes this exact point as well. The way he puts it is that “Systems equilibrate as they improve.”
He discusses the period of “tinkering,” as you call it, and the rise of new strategies and techniques, giving examples such as:
[ul]
[li] pitchers beginning to cover first base[/li][li] the emergence of the cutoff play[/li][li] the hit and run[/li][li] the development of larger, modern gloves[/li][/ul]
Let me quote at length to sum up what Gould says about this:
So, variation decreases as the overall quality of play improves, while a greater percentage of players than before are nearer the limits of human ability. Because remember, not only have we lost the .400 hitter in major league baseball, we’ve lost the .200 hitter as well (except for pitchers, of course). The contraction towards the mean has occurred, according to Gould, at both the upper and lower limits of batting averages.
You’ll get no argument from me about the greatness of Gretsky. But it seems to me that it’s difficult to compare his statistics, and his deviation from the mean, to that of the top baseball players.
Firstly, despite being a team game, baseball is also inherently about individual performance, hitter versus pitcher. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the other guys on your team are, every time you walk to the plate it’s a one on one contest. So, when we’re evaluating the statistical outliers in baseball, we don’t have to try and make the (virtually impossible) evaluation of how much overall team performance has influenced individual performance.
We can’t say this about hockey. Sure, we can look at Gretsky’s stats and see that he was a great player. And anyone who saw him play in his heyday can also, without even looking at the stats, wax lyrical about his speed and his precision and his skill on the ice, his ability to do things that other players just couldn’t do. But the fact is, he played on some great teams during his career (and, admittedly, some mediocre ones), and it’s very hard to quantify the extent to which his team-mates contributed to his statistical success. Their presence didn’t change his own level of skill or ability, but their presence could and did have an impact on how effective that skill and ability was on the ice. In a game like hockey, we never see just a one-man performance, even from the best players on the worst teams.
Also, as others have pointed out, baseball stats take account of bad play by the opposition. If the opposing fielder makes an error on the play, the batter is not credited with a hit. But if an NHL defenseman gives the puck away coming out of the zone, and Gretsky intercepts and goes in on a breakaway to score, that goal is credited to Gretsky without any consideration of the defenseman’s mistake.
Another thing is that, in terms of absolute numbers like career goals, career points, goals per season, and points per season, Gretsky had the advantage of playing in an era where hockey players simply played more games. in 1920-21, the hockey season was 24 games long; in 1930-31 it was 44; in 1940-41 it was 48; in 1950-52 and 1960-61 it was 70; and in the post-1967 expansion era it went to 74, then 78, then 80, then 82. If Gretsky had been born in 1921 instead of 1961, he never could have played 1487 career games.
Also, the baseball stats we’ve been looking at evaluate the player on a performance-per-appearance basis. We’ve been looking at batting averages, not career hits or career home runs, or even season hits or season home runs. So a more accurate measure of Gretsky’s greatness might be his Points Per Game, where he is, in fact, above everyone else as far as i can tell, with 1.92 PPG. In fact, the only person who really competed with him on this statistic was Mario Lemieux, with 1.88. Most other hockey greats hover around the 0.90 to 1.20 mark.
But again, we have to return to the fact that it’s still harder to evaluate and adjust for the presence of these players’ teammates, and the overall quality of the team, in hockey. One reason baseball stats are such an obsession with fans is that the nature of the game itself, the way it is played, makes it so amenable to evaluating individual perfomance in a way that is impossible in almost any other “team” sport. I guess cricket might be an exception, but even cricket stats don’t approach the level of detail and precision that baseball stats have.
None of this is to minimize or detract from brilliance of Gretsky’s play, or his iconic status in hockey. It is merely to point out that it’s more difficult to apply a purely statistical evaluation to a hockey player’s performance than to a baseball player’s performance.